


Watermelon Shampoo

by shslAO3_fanficWriter



Series: Peony and Plum Hand Soap [2]
Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Gen, Kokichi Centric, Major Spoilers, a bunch of other characters are mentioned but this is about kokichi, or at least a little depth, rated teen for a few curse words and iffy material, this goes into depth about what happened with the hydraulic press, vr au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:55:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23487160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shslAO3_fanficWriter/pseuds/shslAO3_fanficWriter
Summary: The steady beep of the heart monitor reminds him every morning that he’s alive.  The warmth of the blankets underneath him echo back to him of his own body heat, pooling around him like blood.  The ceiling is white and unmoving, as all ceilings should be.  The hushed voices of people you never cared about whisper unheard words as you continue to hide in the darkness, remaining unseen for as long as you can.  Heartbeats quicken as footsteps approach, fill you with adrenaline, only to chalk it up to another nightmare and leave.
Series: Peony and Plum Hand Soap [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1689475
Kudos: 42





	Watermelon Shampoo

_Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep._

_The steady beep of the heart monitor reminds him every morning that he’s alive. The warmth of the blankets underneath him echo back to him of his own body heat, pooling around him like blood. The ceiling is white and unmoving, as all ceilings should be. The hushed voices of people you never cared about whisper unheard words as you continue to hide in the darkness, remaining unseen for as long as you can. Heartbeats quicken as footsteps approach, fill you with adrenaline, only to chalk it up to another nightmare and leave._

It doesn’t matter how long it’s been, for time never stops. You can pretend for as long as you’d like, but people will prod at your motionless body so long as they believe there is hope in you coming back. But Kokichi refuses to open his eyes. He couldn’t feel the helmet being removed from his head after he died, only processing the sudden shift in light. His body ached all over and he couldn’t move. His body was so sore that to cope with the pain he couldn’t feel anything at all. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure if he was breathing. But doctors kept coming back to check on him, so surely he must be.

He isn’t sure how long it’s been since he woke up, but Kokichi becomes too bored to pretend to be sleeping any longer. He wants to go back to a life of mischief, pretending that everything is fine. But he can’t open his eyes. He considers calling out for a nurse, but he can’t feel his mouth either. So he continues to lay motionless in bed for quite possibly an eternity. It reminds him of the hydraulic press, of waiting for the cold metal to crush him. To kill him. He could have moved back then, even if the poison was debilitating. Just a little bit, to escape the immense pain. He remembers it pushing down lightly on his toes first, causing him to point his feet down so it wouldn’t touch him. Next it kissed his forehead like a mother wishing her child sweet dreams. But it never let up. It continued to push down onto his already pounding head, his eyes watering as they were squeezed tight.

Unlike now, Kokichi was able to scream back then. He didn’t want to, like he wants to now, but it happened involuntarily as the pressure from the hydraulic press left a tingling sensation is his cheeks just before his eyes popped out of their sockets. Instead of the beep of a heart monitor, he could hear the cracking of his skull as it was slowly crushed. The cold metal felt warm against his chest as his blood fell down into his ears. It was too slow to happen all at once, but he was dead before his entire body was crushed.

Being unable to inform the doctors that he is indeed awake, Kokichi spends his time thinking. Not about his life before the killing game, or what happened during it, but of his last moments. The more he thought about it, the more he questioned his cause of death. He knows Monokuma wouldn’t have been able to tell, and Kaito is too dumb to have pieced anything together, so there’s no way to know for sure. He knows that the hydraulic press was crushing his skull. It could have made him bleed out or squish his brain. It even could have pushed broken skull fragments into his frontal lobe. He knows that the poison had him in his final moments before he even got to the hydraulic press. He’s even starting to consider the possibility of getting a traumatic brain injury from falling into Korekiyo’s trap.

He feels his finger twitch one day, and that’s what finally tips off the doctors to check on him. He still can’t react to them, but he can hear them talk to him. They tell him they’re going to start giving him physical therapy, but he can’t feel when they start. It’s probably around a week later when Kokichi can feel the excruciating pain in his body again, and he’s finally able to scream as his physical therapist lifts his leg. He can feel the hot tears stream down his cheeks and in that moment he wishes he actually had died.

Kokichi hears a new voice one afternoon, and the woman introduces herself as his therapist. He wants to laugh but he doesn’t. He doesn’t say anything to her. He pretends he can’t. She doesn’t come back for a while, but when she does he hears a familiar voice with her. And he breaks down.

Therapy with Kaito is every other Wednesday after lunch. It’s mostly just the therapist explaining that they’ll need time to heal, because Kokichi can’t say much and Kaito is too stubborn to talk when Kokichi won’t.

Two months later and Kokichi can sit up on his own, even if it takes a while to do so. It hurts like hell, but every small sense of autonomy makes him feel less vulnerable. Once Kaito sees him sitting up, he points angrily and shouts at him to actually say something during therapy. He shuts up when Kokichi attempts to snark back at him but can’t say a single coherent word.

All emotional therapy is postponed while Kokichi does speech therapy, and each session feels like the most humiliating moment of his life. He doesn’t want to do it, he doesn’t want to feel lesser and babied, but knows that if he doesn’t, he may never be able to talk again. So he spends his Thursday afternoons trying to pronounce _door_ and _apple_ with his therapist, and every night he talks to himself in gross babbles. But his therapy with Kaito can’t be held off forever, so they resort to having him type up his responses. It’s frustrating, so he asks his nurse if he can try learning sign language in his plentiful free time.

Learning to sign is much better than relearning to speak, mostly because it was his decision and not the side effect of some gruesome killing game. It also helps him with physical therapy. With what little he knows, he bosses around the nurses like he’s a supreme leader again, but it still leaves him feeling empty.

His therapist brings Kaito over for lunch and they spend two hours talking about what happened in the exisal hanger every Wednesday. Kaito usually ends up yelling and sometimes even crying, and Kokichi laughs at him, which is quickly shut down by the therapist as he’s forced to apologize. When the therapist leaves to throw out the trash, Kaito and Kokichi meet eyes and share an understanding look. Kokichi always looks away first.

Five months later, with a large signing capacity and enough mouth muscles to curse people off, the 16 participants are sectioned into three groups. Kokichi is carefully sat into a wheelchair and wheeled into another room where Rantaro, Ryoma, Miu, Angie, and Tenko are waiting. Group therapy for the victims is a lot of naïve bullshit from the therapist as she says things as if she understands what they’ve been through. There are 30 people in the entire world that have gone through the bullshit that is Danganronpa with real life people as characters. Of those 30 people, 16 had their memories rewritten and 27 died. That is, if the gross Team Danganronpa executive who visited his room was telling the truth. Kokichi tells the therapist to shut up during the second session, and instead of talking, she makes them discuss their memories instead. It’s infuriating and Kokichi opts to ignore everything after that.

He only keeps going to group therapy because he physically can’t stop his nurse from taking him. He spends each session thinking about what would have happen if the poison killed him faster or if his potential TBI killed him before he kidnapped Kaito. What if it had killed him before he manipulated Gonta into killing Miu? It takes almost two months until the therapist finally makes them talk about how they all died. Angie goes first, her expression filled with rage as unwanted tears bubble out of her tired eyes. Each account takes up an entire session, the therapist wanting to focus on each individual. Despite how Tenko acted to Angie during the killing game, the two seem to cling together during therapy. Kokichi imagines it’s because they were both killed by Korekiyo. It’s gross to see them have someone to share their pain with. Kokichi doesn’t want any of this.

Miu’s turn is after Ryoma’s, leaving only Kokichi left to speak. Miu rambles on about how her virtual reality was ruined. About how she suffocated from _toilet paper_ of things. But most importantly, she whines about how Kokichi should be in the murderer’s group therapy, because it’s his fault she’s dead. She throws her chair at him when he brings up the fact she was planning to kill him and that if he should be in the murderer’s group just for planning, then so should she. The others all give him disbelieving looks and account their own stories of times Kokichi has antagonized them. Five minutes later and everyone is yelling. Kokichi doesn’t go to group therapy next week. He isn’t allowed to go more than two weeks in a row for everyone’s mental health.

Four months into therapy and Kaede is moved into the victims’ group. Everyone seems shocked except for Rantaro, who continues painting as if there’s nothing strange about a murderer being with the aimlessly murdered. She doesn’t paint with them, instead choosing to quietly sit in the corner. Angie glares in Kaede’s direction as her green paint crosses over the arm Ryoma had spent the past eight minutes perfecting, her lips twitching into a snarl. Tenko looks at her with worry for a brief moment and then goes back to painting. Not even 20 minutes later and the therapist is ending the session early.

Two months go by with the seven of them aimlessly solving puzzles and building with Legos together, and then the therapist tells them to go over their deaths again for Kaede’s sake. For the first session, Angie and Tenko discuss what happened to them, but it’s obviously that Angie wants to spend as little time interacting with Kaede as possible. Miu goes next, and Kokichi doesn’t miss Kaede glancing his way here and there. He goes to the following session, but Kaede isn’t there. He hears she doesn’t come the next week either.

It’s been two years since the killing game ended, and all 16 of them are finally having group therapy together. It’s a disaster. Kokichi doesn’t want to be there, but he’s on edge as too many eyes burn holes through him. It makes him feel naked and defenseless, but he doesn’t back down. He smirks at Miu and this time it’s Maki who throws a chair at him. He sees Kaede flinch and looks over to her, their eyes meeting. The therapist kicks them all out.

Kaede approaches him after a therapy session about two months in. He’d expected it; he’d noticed how she’d stare at him as others would talk. He would stare back, the two of them actively ignoring everyone else together. He’s seen the anger in her eyes, the way she looks like an entirely different person than the girl he’d met at the beginning of the killing game.

He wonders if her unwavering trust was just an act. A lie. Much like how he wore masks to survive, did she smile to convince others she was okay? Were her masks a lie for herself? He finds it ironic. She had fought so hard for trust, but she’s a liar just like he is. He smirks up at her, wondering what it would be like if she saw past his façade. He wonders if he wants her to. Neither of them say anything. It’s an unpleasant moment but Kokichi doesn’t regret it happening. She had faced him down and leveled with him. The anger and confusion in her eyes told him everything he needed to know. He trails after her once she stomps off, waiting for her to scold him. To reprimand him for encouraging the killing game and letting it drag on. Maybe even for her to punish him for killing people and getting away with it. She doesn’t say anything by the time he reaches his room, so he leaves it at that.

He sits numbly in the shower that night, thinking about Kaede’s eyes. They weren’t like Maki or Miu’s—they were akin to Shuichi’s after Gonta’s execution. There was a pain in there that was directed at him, but was more selfish. It wasn’t anger about being killed or having your identity outed. They were angry because they could be. Shuichi was right, not everyone is like him, but Kaede’s eyes looked just as conflicted as he felt about everything. His nurse sits just outside on a stool, asking him questions every few minutes to make sure he hasn’t done anything.

He lays down and clumps of shampoo fall into his eyes. It burns, but he doesn’t move to wash it out. He remembers when the pressure of the hydraulic press pushed his eyes out of his skull and onto the cold table beneath him. His eyes are still there now, and the shampoo sting can attest to that. The shampoo smells like watermelon. It doesn’t mean anything to him, but he feels like it should, like there’s a memory buried deep in his subconscious. It doesn’t matter.

He shifts and gets water up his nose and he starts to cough. The nurse quickly moves the curtain and pulls him out and pats him down with a towel. There’s still shampoo in his hair, and Kokichi thinks about what it would be like if leaving it there could cleanse him of his memories. Maybe the suds would travel through his scalp and infect his hippocampus. Maybe he could be rewritten just like he was rewritten for Danganronpa. Maybe the old him used watermelon shampoo. He demands his nurse to get him a different scent.


End file.
